Tribune 11-11-25 John McDonnell
As Reform surges and we enter a ‘proto-fascist’ moment, it is vital that we reject both complacency and factionalism, and work out how to build a powerful leftist counter-movement — in parliament and beyond.
This autumn’s conference season seemed to shift the standing of most parties by less than the margin of error. Reform maintained its consistent lead over Labour, the Conservatives continued to struggle in third place, and the Liberal Democrats remained in their small-to-medium-sized comfort zone. In a notable exception to the rule, there was new impetus for the Greens following the election of their leader Zack Polanski, with one poll putting them as high as 15 percent.
These polling positions are reflected in the numerous council by-elections that have taken place over the last six months. Reform is taking seats from Labour and the Conservatives, and there are occasional Green or Liberal Democrat success stories. The Labour vote has dropped like a stone (by anything between 10 and 20 percent), with a startling electoral collapse in by-elections in some areas in the North of England. The Liberal Democrats have mostly been stronger in holding off the Reform challenge, though Labour’s by-election performance has been better in London than elsewhere in the country.
With all due caveats — a general election is four years away, there is a very high rate of ‘don’t knows’ in all these polls, and an obvious ‘stay at home’ problem for Labour in by-elections — all signs point to a victory for Nigel Farage and Reform at the next election.
Only in the last few months have political leaders and commentators begun to take this fact seriously, recalling the period prior to Donald Trump’s first presidential victory and the attitudes to Boris Johnson in the run-up to his becoming first mayor of London, then leader of the Conservative Party and the country. People woke up very late to the impact both Trump and Johnson would have, and how far they would go in office in disregarding basic norms of political and personal behaviour. Let’s not repeat that mistake.
The Rise of Proto-Fascism
Harold Laski — a renowned left-wing academic and chair of the Labour Party during the post-war Attlee administration —said that fascism would not arrive in Britain via a strutting, uniformed dictator. The greater risk in this country, he suggested, was the development of a conservative authoritarianism that would see an incremental erosion of our civil liberties and human rights.
It is critically important for socialists to fully understand that Reform and Farage represent just such a threat. In the language of political theory, Reform might be viewed as the symptom of a ‘proto-fascist’ period. We find ourselves living in a time characterised by many of the classic conditions that can enable fascism to develop. Working-class people have experienced years of austerity and pay freezes, resulting in a significant deterioration in their living standards and a heightened level of insecurity. As a result, there are a growing number of people who believe that the economic system has substantially failed them.
In the run-up to the 2024 general election, this produced a demand for change, contributing to the rise to power of the Starmer government on a platform that promised exactly this. But since then, the government’s failure to promptly improve the lives of working people, and a series of catastrophic political mistakes that have, in effect, damaged people’s living standards, have caused dramatic disillusionment.
Historically, we have seen that these are the conditions that often lead to a shift to the far right. More specifically, they are conditions that a populist demagogue can exploit. Instead of blaming the political and economic system of which they are a part (and indeed partly in order to defend that system), the demagogue will target a minority group towards which they can direct people’s frustrations and anger. In our own era, it is not the Jewish community or people of colour who tend to be the scapegoats of the Right, but asylum seekers —with that hate campaign spilling over into attacks on the Muslim community.
The rise of fascism in the past has also taught us that forces can be unleashed over which control can easily be lost. The political route from Farage speeches to 150,000 marchers being mobilised on our streets by convicted criminal Stephen Yaxley-Lennon — the self-styled ‘Tommy Robinson’ — is easily tracked, despite comments from Farage disassociating himself and Reform from Robinson.
This is a dangerous moment, and the Left urgently needs to get its act together to address it. The only effective response to the rise of the far right is to recognise and explain the threat it poses — but also, more importantly, to remove the essential underlying causes of the grievances the likes of Farage can exploit. This means urgently addressing the deterioration of people’s living standards and the insecurity they feel as a result of year after year of austerity. It means decisive and radical political action in an economy and society scarred by grotesque levels of inequality.
There are plenty of analyses, programmes, and detailed pragmatic policy proposals for a progressive government to act upon. What is needed is the political will to put these things into action. The risk is that, just at the time when they are needed most, the political actors who could bring about the change needed either fail to appreciate the scale of challenge or are divided — and, as a result of disunity, are ineffective.
Splitting the Left Vote
Real change can only be brought about by the Left. But an overview of the contemporary left demonstrates just how challenging securing decisive action will be. Although Keir Starmer launched a blistering attack on Farage and Reform at the Labour conference, this was not matched by the announcement of any radical policy programme to tackle the underlying economic issues fuelling the discontent currently being exploited by the far right.
Labour’s electoral strategy — designed by Morgan McSweeney, the apparently Machiavellian election ‘guru’ — appears to be based on tacking rightward on migration in the hope of winning back Labour voters lost to Reform. Meanwhile, it would seem, the disillusionment of progressive voters is to be ignored, on the grounds that these voters have no other option but to vote Labour at the general election.
So far this strategy has proved to be a disastrous failure, on the evidence of both the opinion polls and election results at the local level. With the emergence of a new Green leadership, and a new vehicle of the Left in the form of Your Party, the idea that there is no progressive alternative to Labour also no longer stands.
The argument being put by some in Labour is this: don’t worry, when the general election comes around, progressive voters will flock back to Labour for fear of the election of a Reform government. This view has only been reinforced for such voices by the unfortunate fiasco of the launch of Your Party. It was fairly obvious that in shaping this project Jeremy Corbyn was trying to learn from and impart some of the lessons from the period when we were both in leading positions in the Labour Party — and that, consequently, he wanted to take time to build a grassroots movement capable of evolving organically into a viable electoral formation.
This strategy was mindful of the valid critique of that period by one of Corbyn’s advisers, James Schneider, who refers in his book Our Bloc: How We Win to the failures of ‘parliamentary Leninism’ — that is, top-down decision-making and organising. But for others, Jeremy’s approach was too slow, and enthusiasm overrode judgement. This led not just to a stalling of the party-building process, but also to a loss of confidence in the venture, motivating thousands of potential Your Party members to join the Greens instead.
But if Your Party does get its act together, and the Greens maintain their current momentum, the danger for Labour is that fear of Reform will neither override the aversion many progressives feel towards Starmer’s Labour, nor undermine their new-found enthusiasm for new party affiliations. In that case, there would be a realistic prospect of a scenario suggested by Richard Burgon, whereby large numbers of votes go to the Left, but large numbers of parliamentary seats go to the Right.
Reviving the Labour Left
The Left shouldn’t hide from this possibility but confront it. For Labour Party members, this will mean bringing together new alliances that appreciate the seriousness of the Reform threat, and which mobilise for both the adoption of a radical political and economic programme, and for the democratisation of party decision-making.
Given the current balance of political forces in Labour, especially within the parliamentary party, this will understandably seem like a utopian strategy. However, if Labour is unable to turn around the party’s electoral fortunes over the next period, experience tells us that panic will set in across all the party’s component structures — and that change will inevitably come back onto the agenda.
Of course, this could open up the prospect of the party veering further to the right. But it also raises the possibility of change. The Labour left must prepare itself for this eventuality — with a political and economic programme ready for implementation, and with candidates prepared to contest the party’s leading positions.
If this change scenario plays out — and we have to acknowledge that it is a huge ‘if’ — then those who left the Labour Party in disillusionment may see the argument for unity and solidarity in the face of Farage and return to the fold. Indeed, a new Labour leadership should in this scenario invite all those who left the party — or were forced out — to reunite and rejoin. This may well be the only realistic strategy capable of blocking the election of a far-right government.
All this may seem fantastical and be dismissed as magical realism. But I recall that those were the denigrating judgements thrown at us when we pressed Jeremy Corbyn to stand for the leadership in 2015, and when we fought the 2017 election and came so close to securing power. We live in dangerous times. The Left has an urgent duty to step back now from X and TikTok, and instead discuss in solidarity the role we can and must play in averting a takeover by the far right, whatever organisation we are located in.